This blog exists to support liberatory collectivist activism that is anti-patriarchy, anti-colonialism, and anti-capitalism. It also seeks to center the experiences, theories, and agendas of radical and feminist women of color.

Very privileged people speaking out about making prostitution legal is part of the propatriarchal problem that needs a radical remedy. The remedy is the eradication of prostitution and patriarchies. And to settle for nothing less. See below for some events on this subject and for the list of ten reasons NOT to legalise prostitution... if you give a shit about girls and women around the world, that is. Let all readers here be fully accountable to the girls and women around the world who are enslaved, trafficked, and coerced into systems of prostitution. If you think being a prostitute is a meaningful choice, willfully made, you have one hell of a lot of privilege!

4th Apne Aap Annual Lecture by Dr. Sheila Jeffreys on '10 reasons not to legalize prostitution' ; to celebrate the International Women's Day

Dr. Sheila Jeffreys is the author of 7 books on the history and politics of sexuality and has a long record of feminist activism against sexual violence, pornography and prostitution in the UK before moving to Australia in 1991. She set up the Australia branch of the INGO-Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and currently teaches sexual politics and international feminist politics at the University of Melbourne.

Come for the talk and say no to legalizing exploitation of women and girls.

Other Information

Guests are allowed to bring friends to this event.

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10 Reasons for Not Legalizing Prostitution by Dr. Janice Raymond

Coalition Against Trafficking in Women International (CATW)

Summary
The following arguments apply to all state-sponsored forms of prostitution, including but not limited to full-scale legalization of brothels and pimping, decriminalization of the sex industry, regulating prostitution by laws such as registering or mandating health checks for women in prostitution, or any system in which prostitution is recognized as "sex work" or advocated as an employment choice.

As countries are considering legalizing and decriminalizing the sex industry, we urge you to consider the ways in which legitimating prostitution as "work" does not empower the women in prostitution but does everything to strengthen the sex industry.

10 Reasons for Not Legalizing Prostitution

Janice G. Raymond

Coalition Against Trafficking in Women International (CATW)

March 25, 2003

The following arguments apply to all state-sponsored forms of prostitution,
including but not limited to full-scale legalization of brothels and
pimping, decriminalization of the sex industry, regulating prostitution
by laws such as registering or mandating health checks for women in prostitution,
or any system in which prostitution is recognized as sex work or advocated
as an employment choice.

As countries are considering legalizing and decriminalizing the sex industry,
we urge you to consider the ways in which legitimating prostitution as
work does not empower the women in prostitution but does everything to
strengthen the sex industry.

Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution is a gift to pimps, traffickers and the sex industry.

Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution and the sex industry promotes sex trafficking.

Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not control the sex industry. It expands it.

Legalization of prostitution and decriminalization of the sex industry increases child prostitution.

Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not protect the women in prostitution.

Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution increases the demand for prostitution. It boosts the motivation of men to buy women for sex in a much wider and more permissible range of socially acceptable settings.

Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not promote women's health.

Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not enhance women's choice.

Women in systems of prostitution do not want the sex industry legalized or decriminalized.

ARGUMENTS:

1. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution is a gift to pimps,
traffickers and the sex industry.

What does legalization of prostitution or decriminalization of the sex
industry mean? In the Netherlands, legalization amounts to sanctioning
all aspects of the sex industry: the women themselves, the so-called
clients and the pimps who, under the regime of legalization, are transformed
into third party businessmen and legitimate sexual entrepreneurs.
Legalization/decriminalization of the sex industry also converts brothels,
sex clubs, massage parlors and other sites of prostitution activities
into legitimate venues where commercial sexual acts are allowed to flourish
legally with few restraints.

Ordinary people believe that, in calling for legalization or decriminalization
of prostitution, they are dignifying and professionalizing the women
in prostitution. But dignifying prostitution as work doesn't dignify
the women, it simply dignifies the sex industry. People often don't realize
that decriminalization, for example, means decriminalization of the whole
sex industry not just the women. And they haven't thought through the
consequences of legalizing pimps as legitimate sex entrepreneurs or third
party businessmen, or the fact that men who buy women for sexual activity
are now accepted as legitimate consumers of sex.

CATW favors decriminalization of the women in prostitution. No woman
should be punished for her own exploitation. But States should never
decriminalize pimps, buyers, procurers, brothels or other sex establishments.

Legalized or decriminalized prostitution industries are one of the root
causes of sex trafficking. One argument for legalizing prostitution in
the Netherlands was that legalization would help end the exploitation
of desperate immigrant women trafficked for prostitution. A report done
for the governmental Budapest Group* stated that 80% of women in the
brothels in the Netherlands are trafficked from other countries (Budapest
Group, 1999: 11). As early as 1994, the International Organization of
Migration (IOM) stated that in the Netherlands alone, nearly 70 per cent
of trafficked women were from CEEC [Central and Eastern European Countries]
(IOM, 1995: 4).

The government of the Netherlands promotes itself as the champion of
anti-trafficking policies and programs, yet cynically has removed every
legal impediment to pimping, procurement and brothels. In the year 2000,
the Dutch Ministry of Justice argued for a legal quota of foreign sex
workers, because the Dutch prostitution market demands a variety of bodies
(Dutting, 2001: 16). Also in the year 2000, the Dutch government sought
and received a judgment from the European Court recognizing prostitution
as an economic activity, thus enabling women from the EU and former Soviet
bloc countries to obtain working permits as sex workers in the Dutch
sex industry if they can prove that they are self employed. NGOs in the
Netherlands have stated that traffickers are taking advantage of this
ruling to bring foreign women into the Dutch prostitution industry by
masking the fact that women have been trafficked, and by coaching the
women how to prove that they are self-employed migrant sex workers.

In the one year since lifting the ban on brothels in the Netherlands,
NGOs report that there has been an increase of victims of trafficking
or, at best, that the number of victims from other countries has remained
the same (Bureau NRM, 2002: 75). Forty-three municipalities in the Netherlands
want to follow a no-brothel policy, but the Minister of Justice has indicated
that the complete banning of prostitution within any municipality could
conflict with the right to free choice of work (Bureau NRM: 2002) as
guaranteed in the federal Grondwet or Constitution.

In January, 2002, prostitution in Germany was fully established as a
legitimate job after years of being legalized in so-called eros or tolerance
zones. Promotion of prostitution, pimping and brothels are now legal
in Germany. As early as 1993, after the first steps towards legalization
had been taken, it was recognized (even by pro-prostitution advocates)
that 75 per cent of the women in Germany's prostitution industry were
foreigners from Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay and other countries in South
America (Altink, 1993: 33). After the fall of the Berlin wall, brothel
owners reported that 9 out of every 10 women in the German sex industry
were from eastern Europe (Altink, 1993: 43) and other former Soviet countries.
The sheer volume of foreign women who are in the prostitution industry
in Germany, by some NGO estimates now up to 85 per cent, casts further
doubt on the fact that these numbers of women could have entered Germany
without facilitation. As in the Netherlands, NGOs report that most
of the foreign women have been trafficked into the country since it
is almost impossible for poor women to facilitate their own migration,
underwrite the costs of travel and travel documents, and set themselves
up in business without outside help.

The link between legalization of prostitution and trafficking in Australia
was recognized in the U.S. State Department's 1999 Country Report on
Human Rights Practices, released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights
and Labor. In the country report on Australia, it was noted that in the
State of Victoria which legalized prostitution in the 1980s, trafficking
in East Asian women for the sex trade is a growing problem in Australia.
Lax laws, including legalized prostitution in parts of the country, make
[anti-trafficking] enforcement difficult at the working level.
3. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not control
the sex industry. It expands it.

Contrary to claims that legalization and decriminalization would regulate
the expansion of the sex industry and bring it under control, the sex
industry now accounts for 5 percent of the Netherlands economy (Daley,
2001: 4). Over the last decade, as pimping became legalized and then
brothels decriminalized in the Netherlands in 2000, the sex industry
expanded 25 percent (Daley, 2001: 4). At any hour of the day, women of
all ages and races, dressed in hardly anything, are put on display in
the notorious windows of Dutch brothels and sex clubs and offered for
sale -- for male consumption. Most of them are women from other countries
(Daley, 2001: 4) who have in all likelihood been trafficked into the
Netherlands.

There are now officially recognized associations of sex businesses and
prostitution customers in the Netherlands that consult and collaborate
with the government to further their interests and promote prostitution.
These include the Association of Operators of Relaxation Businesses,
the Cooperating Consultation of Operators of Window Prostitution, and
the Man/Woman and Prostitution Foundation, a group of men who regularly
use women in prostitution, and whose specific aims include to make prostitution
and the use of services of prostitutes more accepted and openly discussible,
and to protect the interests of clients (NRM Bureau, 2002:115-16).

Faced with a dearth of women who want to work in the legal sex sector,
the Dutch National Rapporteur on Trafficking states that in the future,
a proposed solution may be to offer [to the market] prostitutes from
non EU/EEA countries, who voluntarily choose to work in prostitution.
They could be given legal and controlled access to the Dutch market (NRM
Bureau, 2002: 140). As prostitution has been transformed into sex work,
and pimps into entrepreneurs, so too this potential solution transforms
trafficking into voluntary migration for sex work.The Netherlands is
looking to the future, targeting poor women of color for the international
sex trade to remedy the inadequacies of the free market of sexual services.
In the process, it goes further in legitimizing prostitution as an option
for the poor.

Legalization of prostitution in the State of Victoria, Australia, has
led to massive expansion of the sex industry. Whereas there were 40 legal
brothels in Victoria in 1989, in 1999 there were 94, along with 84 escort
services. Other forms of sexual exploitation, such as tabletop dancing,
bondage and discipline centers, peep shows, phone sex, and pornography
have all developed in much more profitable ways than before (Sullivan
and Jeffreys: 2001).

Prostitution has become an accepted sideline of the tourism and casino
boom in Victoria with government-sponsored casinos authorizing the redeeming
of casino chips and wheel of fortune bonuses at local brothels (Sullivan
and Jeffreys: 2001). The commodification of women has vastly intensified
and is much more visible.

Brothels in Switzerland have doubled several years after partial legalization
of prostitution. Most of these brothels go untaxed, and many are illegal.
In 1999, the Zurich newspaper, Blick, claimed that Switzerland had the
highest brothel density of any country in Europe, with residents feeling
overrun with prostitution venues, as well as experiencing constant encroachment
into areas not zoned for prostitution activities (South China Morning
Post: 1999).

Legalization was supposed to get prostituted women off the street. Many
women don't want to register and undergo health checks, as required by
law in certain countries legalizing prostitution, so legalization often
drives them into street prostitution. And many women choose street prostitution
because they want to avoid being controlled and exploited by the new
sex businessmen.

In the Netherlands, women in prostitution point out that legalization
or decriminalization of the sex industry cannot erase the stigma of prostitution
but, instead, makes women more vulnerable to abuse because they must
register and lose anonymity. Thus, the majority of women in prostitution
still choose to operate illegally and underground. Members of Parliament
who originally supported the legalization of brothels on the grounds
that this would liberate women are now seeing that legalization actually
reinforces the oppression of women (Daley, 2001: A1).

The argument that legalization was supposed to take the criminal elements
out of sex businesses by strict regulation of the industry has failed.
The real growth in prostitution in Australia since legalization took
effect has been in the illegal sector. Since the onset of legalization
in Victoria, brothels have tripled in number and expanded in size; the
vast majority having no licenses but advertising and operating with impunity
(Sullivan and Jeffreys: 2001). In New South Wales, brothels were decriminalized
in 1995. In 1999, the numbers of brothels in Sydney had increased exponentially
to 400-500. The vast majority have no license to operate. To end endemic
police corruption, control of illegal prostitution was taken out of the
hands of the police and placed in the hands of local councils and planning
regulators. The council has neither the money nor the personnel to put
investigators into brothels to flush out and prosecute illegal operators.

5. Legalization of prostitution and decriminalization of the
sex industry increases child prostitution.
Another argument for legalizing prostitution in the Netherlands was that
it would help end child prostitution. In reality, however, child prostitution
in the Netherlands has increased dramatically during the 1990s. The Amsterdam-based
ChildRight organization estimates that the number has gone from 4,000
children in 1996 to 15,000 in 2001. The group estimates that at least
5,000 of the children in prostitution are from other countries, with
a large segment being Nigerian girls (Tiggeloven: 2001).

Child prostitution has dramatically risen in Victoria compared to other
Australian states where prostitution has not been legalized. Of all the
states and territories in Australia, the highest number of reported incidences
of child prostitution came from Victoria. In a 1998 study undertaken
by ECPAT (End Child Prostitution and Trafficking) who conducted research
for the Australian National Inquiry on Child Prostitution, there was
increased evidence of organized commercial exploitation of children.
6. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not protect
the women in prostitution.

The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women International (CATW) has conducted
2 major studies on sex trafficking and prostitution, interviewing almost
200 victims of commercial sexual exploitation. In these studies, women
in prostitution indicated that prostitution establishments did little
to protect them, regardless of whether they were in legal or illegal
establishments. The only time they protect anyone is to protect the customers.

In a CATW 5-country study that interviewed 146 victims of international
trafficking and local prostitution, 80% of all women interviewed suffered
physical violence from pimps and buyers) and endured similar and multiple
health effects from the violence and sexual exploitation (Raymond et
al: 2002).

The violence that women were subjected to was an intrinsic part of the
prostitution and sexual exploitation. Pimps used violence for many different
reasons and purposes. Violence was used to initiate some women into prostitution
and to break them down so that they would do the sexual acts. After initiation,
at every step of the way, violence was used for sexual gratification
of the pimps, as a form of punishment, to threaten and intimidate women,
to exert the pimp's dominance, to exact compliance, to punish women for
alleged violations, to humiliate women, and to isolate and confine women.

Of the women who did report that sex establishments gave some protection,
they qualified it by pointing out that no protector was ever in the room
with them, where anything could occur. One woman who was in out-call
prostitution stated: The driver functioned as a bodyguard. You're supposed
to call when you get in, to ascertain that everything was OK. But they
are not standing outside the door while you're in there, so anything
could happen.

CATW's studies found that even surveillance cameras in prostitution establishments
are used to protect the establishment. Protection of the women from abuse
is of secondary or no importance.

7. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution increases the
demand for prostitution. It boosts the motivation of men to buy women
for sex in a much wider and more permissible range of socially acceptable
settings.
With the advent of legalization in countries that have decriminalized
the sex industry, many men who would not risk buying women for sex now
see prostitution as acceptable. When the legal barriers disappear, so
too do the social and ethical barriers to treating women as sexual commodities.
Legalization of prostitution sends the message to new generations of
men and boys that women are sexual commodities and that prostitution
is harmless fun.

As men have an excess of sexual services that are offered to them, women
must compete to provide services by engaging in anal sex, sex without
condoms, bondage and domination and other proclivities demanded by the
clients. Once prostitution is legalized, all holds are barred. Women's
reproductive capacities are sellable products, for example. A whole new
group of clients find pregnancy a sexual turn-on and demand breast milk
in their sexual encounters with pregnant women. Specialty brothels are
provided for disabled men, and State-employed caretakers who are mostly
women must take these men to the brothels if they wish to go (Sullivan
and Jeffreys: 2001).

Advertisements line the highways of Victoria offering women as objects
for sexual use and teaching new generations of men and boys to treat
women as subordinates. Businessmen are encouraged to hold their corporate
meetings in these clubs where owners supply naked women on the table
at tea breaks and lunchtime.

A Melbourne brothel owner stated that the client base was well educated
professional men, who visit during the day and then go home to their
families. Women who desire more egalitarian relationships with men find
that often the men in their lives are visiting the brothels and sex clubs.
They have the choice to accept that their male partners are buying women
in commercial sexual transactions, avoid recognizing what their partners
are doing, or leave the relationship (Sullivan and Jeffreys: 2001).

Sweden's Violence Against Women, Government Bill 1997/98:55 prohibits
and penalizes the purchase of sexual services. It is an innovative approach
that targets the demand for prostitution. Sweden believes that by prohibiting
the purchase of sexual services, prostitution and its damaging effects
can be counteracted more effectively than hitherto. Importantly, this
law clearly states that: Prostitution is not a desirable social phenomenon
and is an obstacle to the ongoing development towards equality between
women and men.**
8. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not promote
women's health.

A legalized system of prostitution that mandates health checks and certification
only for women and not for clients is blatantly discriminatory to women.
Women only health checks make no public health sense because monitoring
prostituted women does not protect them from HIV/AIDS or STDs, since
male clients can and do originally transmit disease to the women.

It is argued that legalized brothels or other controlled prostitution
establishments protect women through enforceable condom policies. In
one of CATW's studies, U.S. women in prostitution interviewed reported
the following: 47% stated that men expected sex without a condom; 73%
reported that men offered to pay more for sex without a condom; 45% of
women said they were abused if they insisted that men use condoms. Some
women said that certain establishments may have rules that men wear condoms
but, in reality, men still try to have sex without them. One woman stated:It's
regulation to wear a condom at the sauna, but negotiable between parties
on the side. Most guys expected blow jobs without a condom (Raymond and
Hughes: 2001).

In reality, the enforcement of condom policy was left to the individual
women in prostitution, and the offer of extra money was an insistent
pressure. One woman stated: ;I'd be one of those liars if I said "Oh
I always used a condom." If there was extra money coming in, then
the condom would be out the window. I was looking for the extra money.
Many factors militate against condom use: the need of women to make money;
older women's decline in attractiveness to men; competition from places
that do not require condoms; pimp pressure on women to have sex with
no condom for more money; money needed for a drug habit or to pay off
the pimp; and the general lack of control that prostituted women have
over their bodies in prostitution venues.

So called "safety policies" in brothels did not protect women
from harm. Even where brothels supposedly monitored the "customers" and
utilized "bouncers," women stated that they were injured by
buyers and, at times, by brothel owners and their friends. Even when
someone intervened to control buyers' abuse, women lived in a climate
of fear. Although 60 percent of women reported that buyers had sometimes
been prevented from abusing them, half of those women answered that,
nonetheless, they thought that they might be killed by one of their "customers
(Raymond et al: 2002).

9. Legalization/decriminalization of prostitution does not enhance
women's choice.

Most women in prostitution did not make a rational choice to enter prostitution.
They did not sit down one day and decide that they wanted to be prostitutes.
Rather, such choicesare better termed survival strategies. Rather than
consent, a prostituted woman more accurately complies to the only options
available to her. Her compliance is required by the very fact of having
to adapt to conditions of inequality that are set by the customer who
pays her to do what he wants her to do.

Most of the women interviewed in CATW studies reported that choice in
entering the sex industry could only be discussed in the context of the
lack of other options. Most emphasized that women in prostitution had
few other options. Many spoke about prostitution as the last option,
or as an involuntary way of making ends meet. In one study, 67% of the
law enforcement officials that CATW interviewed expressed the opinion
that women did not enter prostitution voluntarily. 72% of the social
service providers that CATW interviewed did not believe that women voluntarily
choose to enter the sex industry (Raymond and Hughes: 2001).

The distinction between forced and voluntary prostitution is precisely
what the sex industry is promoting because it will give the industry
more security and legal stability if these distinctions can be utilized
to legalize prostitution, pimping and brothels. Women who bring charges
against pimps and perpetrators will bear the burden of proving that they
were forced. How will marginalized women ever be able to prove coercion?
If prostituted women must prove that force was used in recruitment or
in their working conditions, very few women in prostitution will have
legal recourse and very few offenders will be prosecuted.

Women in prostitution must continually lie about their lives, their bodies,
and their sexual responses. Lying is part of the job definition when
the customer asks,did you enjoy it? The very edifice of prostitution
is built on the lie that women like it. Some prostitution survivors have
stated that it took them years after leaving prostitution to acknowledge
that prostitution wasn't a free choice because to deny their own capacity
to choose was to deny themselves.

There is no doubt that a small number of women say they choose to be
in prostitution, especially in public contexts orchestrated by the sex
industry. In the same way, some people choose to take dangerous drugs
such as heroin. However, even when some people choose to take dangerous
drugs, we still recognize that this kind of drug use is harmful to them,
and most people do not seek to legalize heroin. In this situation, it
is harm to the person, not the consent of the person that is the governing
standard.

Even a 1998 ILO (UN International Labor Organization) report suggesting
that the sex industry be treated as a legitimate economic sector, found
that prostitution is one of the most alienated forms of labour; the surveys
[in 4 countries] show that women worked "with a heavy heart,""felt
forced,"or were ";conscience-stricken" and had negative
self-identities. A significant proportion claimed they wanted to leave
sex work [sic] if they could (Lim, 1998: 213)."

When a woman remains in an abusive relationship with a partner who batters
her, or even when she defends his actions, concerned people don't say
she is there voluntarily. They recognize the complexity of her compliance.
Like battered women, women in prostitution often deny their abuse if
provided with no meaningful alternatives.

10. Women in systems of prostitution do not want the sex industry
legalized or decriminalized.

In a 5-country study on sex trafficking done by the Coalition Against
Trafficking in Women and funded by the Ford Foundation, most of the 146
women interviewed strongly stated that prostitution should not be legalized
and considered legitimate work, warning that legalization would create
more risks and harm for women from already violent customer and pimps
(Raymond et al, 2002). "No way. It's not a profession. It is humiliating
and violence from the men's side. Not one woman interviewed wanted her
children, family or friends to have to earn money by entering the sex
industry. One stated: Prostitution stripped me of my life, my health,
everything.

CONCLUSION

Legislators leap onto the legalization bandwagon because they think nothing
else is successful. However, as Scotland Yard's Commissioner has stated:
'You've got to be careful about legalizing things just because you don't
think what you are doing is successful.

We hear very little about the role of the sex industry in creating a
global sex market in the bodies of women and children. Instead, we hear
much about making prostitution into a better job for women through regulation
and/or legalization, through unions of so-called sex workers,and through
campaigns which provide condoms to women in prostitution but cannot provide
them with alternatives to prostitution. We hear much about how to keep
women in prostitution but very little about how to help women get out.

Governments that legalize prostitution as sex work will have a huge economic
stake in the sex industry. Consequently, this will foster their increased
dependence on the sex sector. If women in prostitution are counted as
workers, pimps as businessmen, and buyers as consumers of sexual services,
thus legitimating the entire sex industry as an economic sector, then
governments can abdicate responsibility for making decent and sustainable
employment available to women.

Rather than the State sanctioning prostitution, the State could address
the demand by penalizing the men who buy women for the sex of prostitution,
and support the development of alternatives for women in prostitution
industries. Instead of governments cashing in on the economic benefits
of the sex industry by taxing it, governments could invest in the futures
of prostituted women by providing economic resources, from the seizure
of sex industry assets, to provide real alternatives for women in prostitution.

NOTES:

*Budapest Group. (1999, June). The Relationship Between Organized Crime
and Trafficking in Aliens. Austria: International Centre for Migration
Policy Development. The Budapest process was initiated in 1991. Nearly
40 governments and 10 organizations participate in the process, and about
50 intergovernmental meetings at various levels have been held, including
the Prague Ministerial Conference.
**The National Rapporteur on Trafficking at the National Swedish Police
has stated that in the 6 months following the implementation of the Swedish
law in January 1999, the number of trafficked women to Sweden has declined.
She also stated that according to police colleagues in the European Union
that traffickers are choosing other destination countries where they
are not constrained by similar laws. Thus the law serves as a deterrent
to traffickers. Quoted in Karl Vicktor Olsson, Sexkopslagen minskar handeln
med kvinnor, Metro, January 27, 2001: 2.

South China Morning Post (1999, September 10).Brothel Business Booming
at a Legal Red-Light District Near You.
Sullivan, Mary and Jeffreys, Sheila. (2001). Legalising Prostitution
is Not the Answer: the Example of Victoria, Australia. Coalition Against
Trafficking in Women, Australia and USA. Available at www.catwinternational.org